


Stealing Bones

by brandytook



Category: The Fall (2006)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:52:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brandytook/pseuds/brandytook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roy and Alexandria have one last adventure to share.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stealing Bones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [innie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/innie/gifts).



After the picture featuring Roy's two seconds of fame flickered to an end the children who had served as audience filed out and back toward their assigned spaces in the hospital.

Alexandria paused next to Roy's wheelchair, and stared at the slumped figure sitting in it. “You were not in the picture. You said I would see you.” The tenuous note of previously broken trust in Alexandria's voice raised Roy's head from his chest.

“I was there,” Roy promised. “You just weren't watching right.”

She cocked her head, and drew her eyebrows together, looking for all the world like an inquisitive robin with a broken wing. “You were not. I watched very carefully.”

“Did you see the man fall off the train tracks and into the river?” Roy asked, and his hand lifted from his knee and then followed a twisting path rapidly back down again—mirroring the fall of the man from the bridge. His hand splashed against his knee and and he breathed out a gust of air that sounded like water rushing over a body.

“Yes.” Alexandria nodded emphatically. “I saw the bad man fall. I saw Governor Odious.”

Roy shook his head and the corner of his mouth turned up in a sneaking smile that Alexandria hadn't seen in two weeks. “You saw me. I pretended to be the other man. It's a trick.”

Alexandria contemplated this, twisting her fingers around one another into complex geometric riddles. “Like when Darwin took the ideas that belong to Wallace. The bad man took your fall and acted that it belonged to him.”

“Sort of, but I agreed to it. I said it was alright for him to use my fall. That's what I do, I let other people use my actions in movies.” Roy pushed the wheelchair into motion. “Come on. I think its time for you to be asleep, don't you?”

Trailing after him Alexandria sung a song composed from her own imagination and a melody she had heard one of the nurses humming earlier. She wondered if someone could steal your actions. She knew that thoughts were easy to steal. But could someone take her skipping in front of the hospital and say it was theirs without her permission. Was that why Roy couldn't walk? Had Governor Odious taken all the movements of Roy's legs for the rest of his life?

\---

Alexandria woke the next morning worried she would be incapable of moving, that someone had crept into this room while she slept and taken all of the movements out of her body. She raised one hand carefully and watched it flutter against the lime green wall. Then she wiggled her toes. Then she sat up and twisted her neck up and down and left and right. Satisfied that she still owned all her movements she jumped out of bed and pattered down the stairs to Roy's room.

The sheet was drawn all around his bed, and the temperate wind that blew in through the window rustled it like an enormous sigh.

“Roy! Roy! We will steal your legs back from Governor!” Alexandria slid through the crack between the sheet and the wall and threw herself onto the hospital bed.

The mattress shifted as Roy pushed himself upright and out of sleep. “What?”

“He took the moving of your legs. I will steal it back for you. Like the M-O-R-P-H-I-N-3. Then you can walk. And jump. And run from here.”

“Alexandria what are you talking about?”

“He stealed your legs.”

“My legs are right there.”

She poked at one of the objects in question through the sheet. “But their moving is stealed. Tell me where he keeps it.”

Still not entirely sure what Alexandria was going on about, but with enough of an inkling to start spinning a story Roy dove in. “In a fortress, far away from here. In the middle of a barren plain there is a lone tower, but instead of pointing up at the sky, the world flips around it, and it tunnels far beneath the surface.”

Alexandria closed her eyes and imagined the fantastical landscape of inverted gravity Roy described. She could see the bright blue sky beneath her feet, and the tower spiraling downwards above her. She pulled at the large, oaken door guarded by two stone dogs, their faces pulled back into terrible growls. It fell open.

“The farther into the Inverted Tower that you walk, the hotter it gets, and at the very, very bottom—or top depending how you look at it,” Alexandria didn't have to open her eyes, she could hear Roy smirking at his own cleverness in the way his voice lifted and fell, “there is a room full of brittle white bones. Shelf after shelf in row after row of them, each bone neatly labeled, each one containing the stolen movement of an innocent victim.”

Exhausted from walking, and oppressed by the clinging heat Alexandria, went into the last room. It looked like the room in the hospital where they kept the medicine, but each of the bottles, instead of being filled with small capsules, held tiny, incomplete skeletons.

“Sometimes the bones shiver with captured motion and the sound of them knocking against each other is like dry sticks cracking under someone's feet.” Roy tapped his fingernails against the wooden side table and Alexandria flinched. Her eyes shot open.

“I will find these,” she said. She slid off of Roy's bed and disappeared out the door before Roy could say anything in response.

\---

Alexandria was lucky that day. She had chicken for lunch. She nibbled carefully at the flesh around the bone, gnawing until there was not a trace of meat left. She studied the fragile and twisted bones that were left when she was done before looking outside to see whether the sky was above or below her. The rays of sun shining on the glass had set it alight, making the world outside an indistinguishable mass of brightness. The light pouring into the room landed on her face and she felt the oppressive heat. Looking back down at the bones in her hand she had a suspicion that they would be just what she needed.

For the second time that day Alexandria came tumbling into the room Roy was sleeping in, calling his name. He peered around the sheet isolating him and watched her lope excitedly across the floor. She reached him, out of breath, and laid the bone that had once been a chicken's leg next to him. “I found it. The fall that took your walking. I found it.” Alexandria pushed the chicken bone at him.

Grasping it between thumb and forefinger Roy brought the bone very close to his face and inspected it carefully. “You know what? I think there's more than one motion trapped in here.” He snapped the bone in two, and it sounded like a dry twig breaking. Then he carefully placed one half on top of Alexandria's cast, and the other on his left thigh. “It will take awhile for our movement to find its way out of Governor Odious' grasp and back to us. But it's sure to happen now.”

Roy offered Alexandria a hand, and pulled her onto the hospital bed. Waiting to heal together, they stared at the blank sheet all around them, and drew pictures on it with sunlight and shadow.


End file.
